aking and to the subsequent development of greater intelligence. He suggested that a change in man's natural habitat, from trees to plains, may have accounted for his new posture. He also expressed the view in his works that "all species had evolved and most likely from a single source" which was not human (Hull 49).
Darwin's Challenge to the Existing Worldview
For Europeans and white Americans of European descent, Commager said "the impact of Darwinism on religion was shattering; its impact on philosophy was revolutionary" (83). Commager said "it toppled Man from his exalted position as the end and purpose of creation, the crown of Nature, and the image of God, and classified him prosaically with the anthropoids" (83). Moreover, Darwin's concept of slow natural evolution over eons contradicted the central thesis of Genesis that God had created the world 6,000 years before in six days. The scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries ended the medieval world view under which "the universe was finite, hierarchical, and purpo
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